Software development topics I've changed my mind on

Just personal opinions, I guess, I agree with most, but here are some I disagree with:

- There is no pride in managing or understanding complexity

Complexity exists, you can't make it go away, managing it and understanding it is the only thing you can do. Simple systems only displace complexity.

- Java is a great language because it's boring

That is if you write Java the boring way. A lot of Java code (looking at you Spring) is everything but boring, and it is not fun either.

- Most programming should be done long before a single line of code is written

I went the opposite extreme. That is, if you are not writing code, you are not programming. If you are not writing code on your first day your are wasting time. It is a personal opinion, but the idea is that without doing something concrete, i.e. writing code, it is too easy to lose track of the reality, the reality being that in the end, you will have a program that runs on a machine. It doesn't mean you will have to keep that code.

- Formal modeling and analysis is an essential skill set

Maybe that explains our difference with regard to the last point. Given the opportunity, I prefer try stuff rather than formalize. It is not that formal modeling is useless, it is just less essential to me than experimentation. To quote Don Knuth out of context: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." ;)

- You literally cannot add too many comments to test code (I challenge anyone to try)

time++; // increment time

> - There is no pride in managing or understanding complexity

> Complexity exists, you can't make it go away, managing it and understanding it is the only thing you can do. Simple systems only displace complexity.

I interpreted that one as a suggestion to avoid welcoming needless complexity because of the false sense of pride it gives you to successfully manage that complexity.

To give an example, I believe C++'s enduring popularity is mostly because of exactly this false sense of pride. You practically need a doctorate-level understanding of the language to use most of its features without stepping on the dozen landmines the language places in your way (I'm so smart because I: remembered to declare my destructors virtual and understand why; can interpret this 2MB of template errors in the compiler output; can """cleverly""" use operator overloads). It can feel nice to be a master of such a complex tool, but that's a false sense of pride. The complexity of your tooling is not the point; the end product is.

C++ complexity exists for a reason. It does a lot of things and these things are useful, if not necessary for those who use it. I can't think of any language that can replace C++ completely. Plenty can replace C++ incompletely, but then you would need another language for the leftovers, that's displacing complexity.

There are modern languages trying to eat C++ lunch, like Zig and Rust, but you don't get decades of backward compatibility, and they are not particularly simple either. Rust in particular is one of the most complex programming language in use today, it could definitely be simplified by removing the borrow checker and lifetime things and make "unsafe" implicit, leave memory safety to the programmer. But it makes no sense because Rust was designed for memory safety and performance, which is a complex problem, and therefore Rust is complex.